A review of the movie "Fast and the Furious 9"

Fast and the Furious 9

One of the best parts of the 20-year-old franchise is a spectacular and self-deprecating blockbuster about how former street racers save the world again.

Dominic ( Vin Diesel ) and Letty ( Michelle Rodriguez ), who has settled somewhere in the outback, understand that they are physically unable to live a calm and peaceful life - any car driving up to the house makes them worried about their son Brian and the desire to take up arms. Fortunately, a great opportunity is turning up to get out of their comfort zone - the plane of their friend, Mr. Nobody ( Kurt Russell ), carrying an important cargo, was attacked and crashed somewhere in the jungle. At first glance, a trifling matter is to find a safe in the wreckage and open it. But in the photographs, Dominic notices the attacker has a silver cross on a pendant - only his younger brother, Jacob Toretto ( John Cena ), who was expelled from the family long ago, had such.

By the tenth film in the series (9 main parts and one spin-off), "Fast and the Furious" received a franchise status that is rare for modern cinema and does not need reviews. Even a long title now seems to be a rudiment - apparently, that is why the picture is released with a concise title F9. Seriously, if you watched the last parts without dissatisfied grumbling due to the fact that the series has long betrayed its street roots and reached the level of Bond and Mission Impossible in terms of ambition, then you will like the ninth part in any case. Another question is how much. This is where fans of the series are in for a pleasant surprise because Fast & Furious 9 is one of the most insane and touching parts of the series that crosses the tomboyish drama of the first film and the inventive action of the fifth.

Fast and the Furious was becoming obsolete:

After the faded eighth part, it began to seem that Fast and the Furious was becoming obsolete: the series “jumped over the shark”, and even such provocative moves as Dominic’s “betrayal” to save his son did not evoke any emotional response. Even post-ironically, it was hard to fall in love with the film - isn't this a clear sign that the franchise has sunk to the bottom? The prospects for the ninth part on paper also seemed vague: the creators promised a completely ridiculous return of a long-forgotten brother and touched on the final trilogy. Stay on as director F. Gary Gray, and the series could have been immediately buried, but Justin Lin returned to the franchise - he not only understands the aesthetics of the series best of all but also turned it into a box office hit in his time. He returned the "Fast and the Furious" to its former greatness.

Furious 9 is most easily compared to the video game

Furious 9 is most easily compared to the video game Uncharted 4: Among Thieves, in which the protagonist's brother also appeared out of nowhere, and the main conflict in the story was internal - the protagonist chose between measured family life and a craving for adventurism. Not only Dominic suffers from the latter in the film, but also Letty - they envy the retired Brian and Mia, but they themselves cannot leave the game, because they suffer from a lack of adrenaline. The typical afterburner "last case/race/adventure" almost for the first time in the series makes the heroes already come to terms with the fact that they can not get out of this. The series, scary to imagine, is finally maturing, overgrown with nuances and shameless dramatic elements.

Another sign of not expanding, but deepening the franchise is the introduction of Jacob into the rich lore of Fast and the Furious. The film opens with a touching, like the end of Cars, a segment on the race track with the death of Toretto Sr. Even such an unequivocal event causes an aggravation of their conflict instead of an obvious rapprochement between the brothers. Subsequent flashbacks not only return long-forgotten street racing to the series but also surprisingly boldly push the brothers together: because of envy and - suddenly - the involvement of one of them in the death of their father. This thread culminates in a rather surreal segment with Dominic's odyssey through the backstreets of memory. Such bold narrative devices have never been in Fast and the Furious.

The main forces of "Fast and the Furious"

The main forces of "Fast and the Furious" - cars and beautiful girls - have also changed in the new part: the heroines are now not sexualized, self-sufficient, and they also got their own action scene, which looks many times better than that shame from the Avengers: Endgame movie. In the classic episode with a large-scale party, the girls-extras now go not in bikinis, but in white dresses against the backdrop of a London residence, and even the sex symbol of our time, rapper Cardi B, appears in the film in full special uniforms up to her neck and shines only with her face. The Fast and the Furious is no longer a relic of the 2000s and not a “bad movie”, but a franchise ready for experimentation and adaptation to modern realities, which, you see, will release a successful spin-off with female characters in a couple of years.

The main thing in the Fast and the Furious

However, the main thing in the Fast and the Furious from the fifth part is action episodes: after Brian and Dominic drove a huge safe through the whole of Rio by car, it became clear that the level of madness would constantly rise and return to normal street racing is not an option. In the last parts, the characters flew from one skyscraper to another and managed to outwit an infrared warhead, but the ninth film did these episodes thanks to ... a magnet. Episodes from Edinburgh and Tbilisi will be included in the canon of the best action scenes in the series. It is difficult to explain in words how inventive an action game can be, built on just the processes of attraction and rejection, but, believe me, the last time so much creativity poured from the screen was at the end of Christopher Nolan's Argument.

Fast and the Furious" most successful at the box office

The latest and most successful at the box office "Fast and the Furious" were made according to the same scheme: mind-blowing chases in different locations and the most difficult stunts were held together by a primitive story about how a certain villain (ka) is trying to take over the world, and a group of heroes at the head with Dominic, demonstrating miracles of courage, dexterity and idiocy, does not allow this.

The same path was chosen for Fast and Furious 9. Hundreds of cars of all stripes and colors appear in the frame, from nimble sports cars to solid armored personnel carriers. All of them break, explode and soar into the air in the most sophisticated, spectacular, and far from the laws of physics ways. There is even a rally through a minefield and tricks with a magnet that can attract half a city to itself - the fantasy of car choreographers knows no bounds.

With the plot, everything is somewhat sadder. In order to somehow expand the scope of the franchise, the writers made a jump into Dominic's past and found there a skeleton in the closet - a younger brother who became an outcast after the death of their father. True, for all 20 years, none of the characters even mentioned it in passing, but these are trifles: sudden appearances, like resurrections, will not surprise us today. There will also be resurrections, by the way, so take paper handkerchiefs with you. Now the car saga has taken a serious turn towards family values, giving the authors a "great" reason for high-browed statements like "a strong family will never die."

Only we all understand that such “innovations” are just an addition to the extravaganza of tricks that are unlikely to show the franchise a new path. Yes, and the problem of "villains" is still very acute: the beauty hacker Cypfer (Charlize Sharon), an old acquaintance from the previous film, is still badly written and is just a function. And the new antagonists, the same Jacob Toretto, are just a walking set of templates without charisma and charm.

Therefore, solely for the sake of variety, the writers had to shoot the characters into space, providing this flight into the world of absurdity with a fair amount of self-irony. What to expect next: racing through the Martian desert? teleportation to the future? relocation to hell? At number nine, this attraction will not be closed: there are at least two more films ahead, and the producers, willy-nilly, will have to change something. Otherwise, the car saga, which is still running, will finish with a punctured tire and a tragicomic result.